Page 271 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
turn about and steer for Pakistan instead of Africa. I had more
reason than ever to visit that part of Asia. I wanted to see Meluhha.
So far Meluhha had been for me nothing but an unidentifiable name
common on Sumerian tablets. I had consulted Bibby’s book again
and read: ‘Dilmun and Makan were always being named together,
often in the same sentence, and often together with a third land, that
of Meluhha.’1
We had been to both Dilmun and Makan. Where was Meluhha?
Though I had never had any idea, the name had always reminded
me of names surviving in the Malay area, like the Malacca peninsula
and the Moluccas archipelago. But now, convinced that Dilmun
and Makan had been properly identified, it seemed to me that
Meluhha, by a very simple system of elimination, had to be the
Indus Valley region. There was no other important coastal civilisa­
tion nearer to ancient Mesopotamia, and there was a wealth of
evidence to prove contact between Mesopotamia and the Indus
Valley in Sumerian times, so much contact that there was bound to
be some reference to that trading partner in the Sumerian texts. If
we set the important Sumerian place-name Meluhha aside as
unidentified, what then was left as the Sumerian name for the Indus
Valley? There had to be one, since it was the only nearby contem­
porary civilisation with which we know they had extensive contact.
As with the Sumerians, so also with their contemporaries in the
Indus Valley: their culture collapsed, their cities were abandoned,
their very existence was forgotten among surviving nations until
their ruins were discovered and their arts and crafts were brought
back into the daylight by modern archaeologists. The Sumerians,
before they vanished, had exchanged their original hieroglyphic
signs for a cuneiform spelling which modern scientists have been
able to decipher. Thus the word ‘Meluhha’ has come down to us as
the name for one of their foreign trading partners. But the hiero­
glyphic signs of the Indus Valley civilisation, although well known
today and easily recognisable, have so far withstood all the efforts of
the cipher experts, and we know none of their geographical names,
not even the one they used for themselves and their own land. Like
fingerprints, the Indus Valley script cannot be read, but wherever it
is found it identifies the hands that made it.
Indus Valley seals inscribed with Indus Valley script and deco­
rated with characteristic Indus Valley motifs have been excavated
by archaeologists, not only in the Indus Valley, but also in distant
Mesopotamia. A quite considerable number of them have been
found during excavations in Iraq, all the way from the former gulf
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